Guild Wars 2

First of all Necromancers are my favourite profession hands down, however unlike most people I never use condition based builds and I probably never will. Condition stacking is not only boring (press1/afk) but it achieves less in PvE than a typical power/critical damage build. I’m not even going to bother mentioning Minion Mastery as an option since I actually enjoy using my brain while I play the game.

Almost every skill on a Necromancer be it weapon skills, traits or utility skills, they’re all pretty much based around spreading conditions. Even the weapons which you’d expect to be power oriented (axe/dagger) are mostly condition based and have god awful power ratios.

The most agonizing truth I’ve had to face is that Necromancers are practically trash in dungeons, it’s nauseating to see an Elementalist mashing one with a lightning hammer and out dps’ing myself who is constantly chaining to deal trivial damage. I’d go as far as to say a longbow Warrior can do more damage than me in my prime.

Necromancers, regardless of their massive health pools are ridiculously squishy when not played correctly, they have no easily accessible stability and lack any mobility outside of DS2. Almost every other profession in the game has these and they make a massive difference in fractals especially.

Since I’ve started playing my Warrior more frequently I’ve slowly lost any desire to work on Ascended gear for my Necromancer. This is down to the fact that any stat I add to my Necromancer would be far more advantageous on any other character.

The game has blatant balancing issues that have existed for too long now, the hardcore players find themselves using broken mechanics or clearly unbalanced classes so they can actually have an impact on end game.

The issue is also in game design. They push us as a condition/ support class but don’t allow it to work in PvE. Necro won’t be useful until PvE mechanics are addressed

Gnat.9405:

The issue is also in game design. They push us as a condition/ support class but don’t allow it to work in PvE. Necro won’t be useful until PvE mechanics are addressed

^Totally this. Conditions and control are not balanced in PVE. They are inferior to direct damage, and I’d even go as far as to say control is completely useless. All of the bosses have Defiant/Unshakeable, rendering them immune to control skills. Especially in the open world defiant stacks get so absurd that you will never remove all the defiant stacks before the boss dies. But in dungeons as well, the coordination and dedication required to peel off those stacks of Defiant is not justified by the meager pay off that 1 or 2 seconds of Fear offers.

I’ll even go one step further, and say that against trash mobs necro-control skills are pretty poor as well. Fearing away enemies often annoys your party more than it helps them. And what is the point of slapping 1 second of fear on some Risen, when they then hit you back with 4 or 5 seconds of fear? Not to mention that the game often bugs out, and enemies that are feared do not run away. I think for PVE our fears should generally last longer, and work on bosses. Obviously that would be unbalanced for pvp and wvw, which is why such changes should be split.

They really do need to make more changes split between pvp/wvw/pve. You can’t change one thing totally because it’s overpowered in pvp or wvw, that would be nerfing certain aspects of pve, maybe something we needed in pve. I’m glad they have done so recently, but more of it, and for all classes is optimal.

I think that conditions are good in PVE as long as they have enough time to kick in. However this hardly ever happens in dungeons because mobs die pretty quickly. Bosses also don’t take long to kill if your party runs zerker builds and they have “Unshakable” and “Defiant” that makes them resilient to some conditions and cc.
On top of that necros bring limited group utilities that make them much less desirable in parties compared to any other class.

Individual condition stacks would do wonders.
Allowing objects to take condi dam, would do wonders.

Then there’s just the balance of power also get’s effected by +%dam like vulnerability.
Also power get’s huge boosts from Crit % and Crit Damage.

As for Power Necro, it’s melee ranged weaps that don’t cleave. Without the attrition or damage to make up for it vs other class’s. More risk, less rewards.